Philippines’ cash-strapped cops pin hopes on new crime-buster president

The police force in Manila is so underfunded that officers say they have to buy their own bullets and it is not uncommon for funeral service cars to give cops a lift along to murder scenes because they have no vehicles of their own.

Members of the Philippine National Police (PNP) Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) patrol along a main street of Metro Manila

Enter Rodrigo Duterte, who won this week’s presidential election in the Philippines on a single-issue campaign of crushing crime, corruption and drug abuse.

He has pledged to raise policing standards to the level of Davao, the once-lawless city in southern Mindanao, where he has been mayor for 22 years and the only one in the country that runs its own 911 emergency call service.

Duterte’s message, unpolished and peppered with profanities, tapped into popular alarm over a drug-fuelled jump in crime. In 2012, the United Nations said the Philippines had the highest rate of methamphetamine, or “shabu”, use in East Asia.

The U.S. State Department said 2.1% of Flipinos aged 16 to 64 were using shabu, the main drug threat in the Philippines along with marijuana. Read More